ON JULY 3, the All-India Feminist Alliance (‘ALIFA’) has written to the Election Commission of India (‘ECI’) raising concerns about the systematic decimation and large-scale erosion of women's voting rights in the context of the Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) of electoral rolls, underway since 2025. Fifty signatories, including activists, advocates, law students, researchers and journalists from across the country, have appealed to ECI to ensure that no woman or transgender person is left out of the voter lists on account of systemic problems in the process.
According to the submission, “Women, transgender persons, and members of minority, especially Muslim communities, got deleted in greater percentages than their proportion in the population.” In states such as Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal, the group says the revised voter list has led to a substantial drop in the gender ratio recorded in the electoral rolls.
ALIFA, which is an initiative of National Alliance of People’s Movements, has framed its intervention around the “error of exclusion” principle in social policy and has advocated that revision processes must be designed to protect the most vulnerable and marginalized from being wrongly dropped, even at the cost of some administrative inconvenience.
